This post extends the 2025 LER Ecosystem SmartReport and our Top LER Trends of 2025 blog post. We interviewed thirty-six experts from the LER ecosystem to understand trends across the ecosystem. Here we predict three that are poised to be included in next year’s report.

1. The Comprehensive Learner Record will gain traction in K-12 education, empowering educators to deliver personalized learning and create connective tissue to employment and postsecondary education opportunities.

Many experts we interviewed believe that more connectivity is needed between K-12 school districts and employers, training providers, and higher education institutions. Students lose access to their data as they move between schools and graduate from secondary education. The Comprehensive Learner Record data format is seen as a critical way to give students agency over their data, and its applications in K-12 education have caught the attention of some new LER ecosystem participants.

“The tremendous investments made in K-12 education need to extend beyond graduation,” said Michael Discenza, Chief Technology Officer of ShooLinks. “We’re working to give students agency to leverage their data to communicate their value to employers when they lack work experience. Work experience is so highly valued that employers often overlook the skills students develop in school and through extracurriculars.  CLRs provide a method to persist students accomplishments.”

SchooLinks is a modern college and career readiness platform designed to support K-12 school districts in enhancing student performance. The platform allows students to explore colleges, plan careers, and access personalized guidance and resources. SchooLinks has the national scale to issue millions of LER records and could be part of a groundswell in 2025 that would force more players in the space, higher ed institutions, and employers, to take notice and invest in their ability to programmatically consume LERs.

SchooLinks syncs academic data to the platform from student information systems to power their tools. Their work-based learning tool supports districts in coordinating and verifying experiences like internships and the skills/achievements from these experiences, and students are already using this data as part of the college application workflow directly on the platform. But SchooLinks is diving headfirst into LERs through its partnership with ASPYR Workforce Innovation in Ohio through the SkillsFWD grant. They are issuing CLRs to students and provide a wallet for credential management. 

“We tend to think of LERS as something technical, but I prefer to think of our work in the space as more about the public good - it’s about highlighting the value of our community’s investment in K-12 education. Representing students’ achievements in ways that are portable, official, and tangible gives educators, taxpayers, and most importantly students clear ways to realize that value,” says Discenza.

SchooLinks isn’t the only platform bringing secondary education data into the LER Ecosystem. Knowledge As A Service is introducing open badges in 2025 to empower learners with verifiable, stackable credentials tied to habit-building and performance outcomes. Their badges are designed to reflect tangible competencies, providing high schoolers with portable, shareable proof of their skills, whether for education, career readiness, or personal growth according to Robert Feeney, Chief Visionary Officer of KAAS.  KAAS operates Ringorang a platform that has issued badges previously but is now partnering with Accredible to make those badges Open Badge compliant and portable through the LER ecosystem so students can use them to further their careers. For example, a student participating in a career readiness program could earn a badge for mastering Effective Workplace communication. This badge would reflect their completion of relevant challenges, demonstrate competency, and serve as a shareable credential for future employers or educational institutions.

SchooLinks isn’t the only platform bringing secondary education data into the LER Ecosystem. Knowledge As A Service is introducing open badges in 2025 to empower learners with verifiable, stackable credentials tied to habit-building and performance outcomes. Their badges are designed to reflect tangible competencies, providing high schoolers with portable, shareable proof of their skills, whether for education, career readiness, or personal growth according to Robert Feeney, Chief Vision Officer of KaaS. "Essential skills are what employers are demanding, and what students and parents recognize as needed."

KaaS operates Ringorang, a gamified microlearning platform that has issued badges previously but is now redeveloping those badges to be Open Badge compliant and portable through the LER ecosystem so students can use them to further their careers. For example, in the Future Ready National Game Tournament, a participating student could earn a badge for mastering Effective Workplace Communication. According to Aya Long, Product Lead for Future Ready by Ringorang, "This badge would reflect the student's completion of relevant challenges, demonstrate their competency, and serve as a shareable credential for future employers or educational institutions that value essential skills like communication." 

Keith Look, Vice President of Education Solutions for Territorium, a CLR issuing platform, says the company sees growing interest in CLRs in secondary education to bolster the portrait/profile of a graduate. “Students have been measured by their skill in reading, writing, and math over the years and there is growing recognition that profiling learners in that way underreports the skills and knowledge they develop. Educators are moving to recognize and document other skills gained such as collaboration, teamwork, and citizenship. These skills are important for our society to develop and are equally important to employers. The desire to document and verify these skills is gaining momentum,” Look shared.

Mark Leuba has worked to advance the CLR standard since 2015 when he joined 1EdTech to advance the concept of an extended transcript.  “The K-12 world needs CLRS so that as students move across school systems and states there is a systematic way to capture learning so that learning can be captured and gaps can be filled,” Leuba shared. The CLR’s ability to make evidence of learning portable is critical, it makes education more portable and interoperable across systems. Secondary education represents an enormous adoption opportunity for Comprehensive Learner Records.”

2. Employer struggles with AI-generated resumes at scale will drive early investments in LER adoption by a few innovative employers and HR systems 

As Dave Wengel, Founder and CEO of iDatafy and SmartResume, wrote in a 2024 blog post “For years, large employers have employed AI to sort and rank job applicants in less than transparent ways.  This has led to growing frustration and dissatisfaction among job seekers as many question whether a human being is reviewing their application or whether it is entering some type of resume black hole. Employers probably never predicted a world where millions of job seekers would turn around and begin to leverage GenAI themselves in their own job applications.  But that is where we are today.  Employers are beginning to get overwhelmed with “perfect looking” Gen-Ai powered resumes that make extreme multiples of applicants all look like a great fit for the position.”

This adoption of AI to write customized resumes by job seekers took off in 2023 and 2024. The employers we spoke with at The Human Potential Summit estimated that at least 60% of resumes submitted in 2024 were written by AI.  In this published case study, Dr. Megan Workomon Larsen, Director of Learning Experience Design at ASU Enterprise Technology, shared that they saw a 300% increase in applicant volume for their IT support jobs between 2022 and 2023, which led to a 600% increase in the human resources required to fill their positions. Larsen outlined how not only were resumes written by AI but the use of AI “...homogenized and flattened applications overall, making it difficult to identify candidates whose skill sets truly matched the job requirements.”

The degradation in resume accuracy combined with inflated claims caused when job seekers trust AI tools to make them appear qualified for jobs poses a crisis for hiring efficiency. Not only does it lead to more complex and expensive hiring processes, but it can also lead to more hires of unqualified candidates. This excerpt from a 2024 Wall Street Journal article highlights concerns:

“​​While candidates have long inflated their experience during their job searches, recruiters say there has been a rise in so-called fake candidates—people who misrepresent their experience and identities. These candidates are applying for remote roles with experience on their résumés that is later found to be made up. Recruiters suspect fake candidates are getting through Zoom interviews either by using software or having a third party feed them answers.

For years companies have been relying on software that automates various aspects of hiring. The process has led to frustration among applicants who can be removed from consideration without their résumés ever being viewed by a human. The combination of a cooler labor market and the ubiquity of remote interviews is only exacerbating the onslaught of AI-related issues. 

“Nearly all of our customers, particularly the larger tech companies, are struggling mightily with the amount of applicants they’re getting,” says Ben Sesser, chief executive of the interview-software platform BrightHire. “Our clients are noticing the use of AI a lot throughout the hiring process”

Wengel believes there is a solution, “I believe the solution consists of two parts- a next generation resume platform that leverages verifiable data for job seekers and verified skills talent marketplace technology for employers.  The next gen resume platform should still allow job seekers to use GenAI to help polish sections of their resume based on inputs about their skills, experience, qualifications, and interests. But instead of leveraging the job description to reverse engineer qualifications, AI should lean on digitally verifiable Learning and Employment Records from trusted third parties to help them generate their resume. For the employers, they need to be able to post skills first job descriptions that value verified skills and soon be able to ingest the rich metadata included in the LERs and apply it to their applicant tracking system ruleset.”

Colin Strasburg reported on Accenture’s work to leverage verifiable credentials in the hiring process in this 2024 LinkedIn blog post.  “We aimed to demonstrate that organizations can verify these credentials and instantly consume and trust the data being shared by the user, resulting in improved processes and reduced costs,” Colin shared. This pilot successfully routed verifiable credentials from a digital wallet into Workday for verification and validation. This means the first successful test with an employer and their HRIS system has already happened. This will accelerate in 2025, partially due to our third and final prediction…

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3. The Learning and Employment Record-Resume Standard will launch across the LER-Ecosystem driving interoperability between public and private LER platforms to new heights

The Learning and Employment Record-Resume Standard (LER-RS) from HR Open Standards was released in 2024. This format provides a consistent and organized layout for resume data, emphasizes highlighting demonstrable skills and competencies, and links LER data to make claims verifiable enhancing resume credibility. Many LER experts believe it will be this data format that is adopted by HR and Applicant Tracking Systems since employers value resumes.  The LER-RS format can provide employers with all of the information they ask for in job applications even better than resumes.  For example, a LER-RS can not only provide education, skill, and work experience data but also link verifiable credentials to prove residency, work eligibility, and more. 

The HR Open Standards workgroup for LER-RS adoption meets twice a month to advance the adoption of this standard. They are actively recruiting Credential Management Tools including Credential Wallets, LER Resume Builders, LER talent marketplaces, and even Applicant Tracking Systems to adopt these data standards.  In 2025 the first wave of integrations between these platforms will make data in this format portable.

The HR Open adoption workgroup’s goal is to be able to demonstrate an end-to-end use case for employers in 2025 showing how a user can aggregate verifiable credentials in a wallet, push those to a LER-Resume Builder to shape into a resume that combines LER credentials with self-attested traditional resume content, and push that LER-Resume into a LER Talent Marketplace where they can submit it to employers. Employers will view that comprehensive set of data and be able to verify those credentials in real time on that marketplace platform. However, the job seeker will have to convert their LER-Resume into a PDF to apply through the career sites of those employers to complete the application process. These use cases will be leveraged to recruit a cohort of employers to drive LER-RS adoption and integration at the HR systems layer in 2026 and beyond.

The LER Ecosystem made remarkable progress in the interoperability and portability of Open Badges and CLRs in 2024. However, a user's “whole profile” on a platform still can’t be transported to other platforms in the ecosystem.  That data loss is suboptimal and it will be addressed and demonstrated through LER-RS integrations in 2025.

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